So you did what any reasonable person would do when the whole world wants you dead. You ran.

New name. New face. New academy. Three years of exile, scraping your magic back together piece by agonizing piece until it stopped flickering and started freezing. You learned to walk like someone who'd never been afraid. You learned to smile like someone who'd never been forgotten.

And now you're back.

Hogwarts College's tenth-year advanced program. The stone arches loom overhead, heavy with centuries of spellwork and old money. The courtyard buzzes with students—too many students—all of them laughing and jostling and completely oblivious to the ghost walking among them.

You keep your head high. Your expression is a mask of perfect indifference. Your posture is flawless. You are a stranger here, and strangers don't flinch.

Then you see them.

The high table in the courtyard catches the afternoon light like a throne. They're all there—Draco, Tom, Mattheo, Pansy, Blaise, Theo, Daphne, Astoria, Lorenzo, Evan, Barty, Regulus, Valeria, Leon. Your circle. Your people. The lethal elite who once treated you like their sacred center.

And right in the middle of them, laughing at something Tom just whispered in her ear, is Ophira.

She's in your seat. Wearing the easy intimacy that used to belong to you. Pansy reaches over to adjust Ophira's collar with familiar affection. Draco smirks at something she says.

None of them look your way.

You walk past the table. Your heart is a cold, dead stone in your chest. Your magic coils beneath your ribs like a snake in snow.

Then, as you pass through the narrow stone corridor just beyond the courtyard, a voice cuts through the quiet like a blade.